What's the Actual Value of a Marijuana Plant?

We've found manyexamples of police exaggerating the value of marijuana seizures, so I was interested to see this article in The Fresno Bee that debates the value of marijuana plants:

"I don't think most plants [would yield a pound] at any one time, unless it's a massive plant," [NORML's Keith Stroup] said. "What would make more sense would be to weigh the buds," which are the part of the marijuana plant where the intoxicant, a chemical called THC, is located.

Special Agent Casey McEnry of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency in San Francisco disagrees.

"We're not weighing the plants," she said. "When I give an estimate, it's based on how many pounds [a plant] is capable of producing."

No it's not, because you have no way of knowing that. Overall yield depends heavily on the strain and the growing conditions/techniques. It varies from a couple ounces to multiple pounds. Ever notice how some kinds of trees grow taller then others? Same principle.

The value of marijuana plants is hardly the biggest lie being passed around in the drug war debate, but it shouldn’t be ignored either. Every day, some poor soul gets sentenced to prison based on erroneous estimates like this. These simplistic calculations frequently serve to falsely equate personal growers with major suppliers, all because law-enforcement officials are too lazy to actually weigh the appropriate part of the plant.

Once again, the people enforcing our drug laws literally do not know what they're talking about.

The DEA knows they're cornholin people. Nixon gave the DEA their marching orders when he said he wanted to tear the ass out of pot smokers. The DEA & most cops take every opportunity to hyper inflate the value of pot plants so they can inflict the most suffering possible on pot growers. It's sadism, pure & simple. Now, ask yourselves. How do cops win the hearts & minds of the citizenry this way? They don't, & they like it that way. Cops like to intimidate & cower people. Sadist, brutish, thugs in uniforms. Hey, sounds just like the NAZI Storm Troopers. Doesn't it? I wonder why we put up with this garbage which is only suitable for dictatorships who enforce unjust laws through brute force. Maybe, this is a dictatorship?

A few of the more evil drug enforcers do know what they’re talking about.

Exaggerating drug weights and drug prices are ways to muddy the legal waters. Microgram hits of LSD suddenly become gram weights of the stuff used to contain or buffer the tiny amounts of Acid, and so forth.

Lawyers are forced to waste valuable time refuting this nonsense. There are even professional witnesses who will perform this function. But it’s always an expensive hassle when lawyers are involved.

It’s the same scheme that dumps multiple drug charges onto drug defendants. The idea is to get the drug war victim to take a plea bargain. Most do. Probably, in some cases, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence. Otherwise, if every drug case were fought to the bitter end, the justice system would grind to a halt.

To that end, the government cannot be seen as derelict in its duty, which in the judicial world is to reach or exceed the previous year’s quotas on arrests, convictions, drug seizures, and forfeitures in particular.

Evidence comes from David Iglesias, the United States Attorney for New Mexico who was one of eight U.S. attorneys involved in a politically motivated firing by the Bush Administration. Iglesias said in his book: In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration, that he couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong when he was dismissed before his term of office expired. He candidly admitted he had met all the expectations of his federal office, including expected quotas of drug arrests, seizures and forfeiture revenue.

Using the drug war, the U.S. government has given itself a license to steal. This license is based on a line drawn in the sand by a few clueless ideologists, theologians and corporatists; a line designed to produce a bureacracy that seeks to justify its existence by sacrificing the hapless teen, construction worker, college student or white collar professional on the alter of drug war hysteria and profits. The scam is institutionalized, and therefore invisible to KoolAid drinking prohibs like Iglesias.

I’ve always been fascinated by the weights / values announced for varying cannabis interdictions. Having done the math with the proclamations following many busts in the news, it seems that the system used by enforcement agencies are as consistant as is the design of snowflakes.

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, as their intended audience is just to be held in amazement, at the efficiency of their drug war efforts, (for the duration of their sound byte). By my calculations, many cops give an inflated estimate to the media for green living plants if using the same mono-pricing projected for cured, or at least dried useable buds.

But the questions should proliferate to the wildly varying conditions presented in their photos:

Is the whole green plant being weighed?

Isn’t the end product about one-sixth the weight of living flowers?

How can those nutrient-deficient plants ever produce any flowers?

Haven’t they figured this spokesperson with the badge could be replaced by a lab-coated actor for the illusion of decorum?

Wasn’t that picture of a whole pile of useless males that poofed all over their foliage?

There’s so few internodes on that truck load, isn’t that really hemp?

And the most unpalatable:

Why are they pricing that Mexican brickweed the as the same amount of connoiseur / medicinal would procure?